Hey!

Last week, our class took a mini field trip to The Rare Books Library where we visited Joy Kogawa’s Fonds. We were able to look at a lot of her own personal things. These included fan letters, emails, rejection letters, multiple drafts, etc.

One of the things I focused on in the Fonds were the fan letters. I was surprised because of the large amount of letters from Japanese Canadians themselves. They enclosed letters about their families, their own personal struggles and the hardships their families went through. I spent most of the time in the Fonds reading and rereading the letters that people had written her because they mentioned how Joy Kogawa had helped them come to terms with their own personal histories.

In Obasan, Joy Kogawa talked about her family’s conflicts. She talked about her struggles, but also Obasan’s, Aunt Emily’s and even Steven’s. Despite this, the horror of the Japanese Internment didn’t seem as real to me as it did reading those letters last Thursday.

It reminded me that this was a National thing; that despite Canada’s reputation of being multicultural and accepting and nice, we weren’t always this way.

My grandparents immigrated here from Pakistan with my dad approximately 40 years ago, when my dad was only 5 months old. Despite my family being born there, I never went back to Pakistan to visit. To me, I was born Canadian and I would always be Canadian.

However, some Japanese Canadians, like Joy, were born in Canada too, but were still sent back to “their home country”.

I can only imagine how hard it would have been for them to live through that. Canada is my home, just as much as it was theirs. Canada was Joy’s home just as much as it was for the non-Japanese Canadians at that time.

Joy Kogawa’s Fonds helped me understand Obasan and her story a lot more than before. It demonstrated to me that this happened across the country and it was an absolutely terrible thing to happen.

Canada’s history is more than just hockey, gay marriage, and free healthcare. Canada’s history has been inexplicably racist at times.

However, I did also get a chance to skim through Pierre Trudeau’s letter to Joy Kogawa. In his letter he said he looked forward to reading Obasan. I’m glad to know that her history resonated with a Prime Minister, even if just for a little bit.

Hey!

This week I’m going to talk about Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco, a book we’re reading in my ASTU class. Like Persepolis, which was discussed in the last blog post, Safe Area Gorazde is yet another graphic narrative. However, this graphic narrative varies in some ways to Persepolis.

For one, Persepolis was narrated by “Marji”, a younger version of the author Marjane Satrapi. She reflected on her own experiences rather than anecdotes of other people.

Safe Area, however, was narrated by Joe Sacco, an American journalist, and relied heavily on other people’s stories and anecdotes. Half of it was him talking about what it was like being in Gorazde; the friends he made, the parties he went to, and the songs they sung together. The other half were stories the other people told Joe. These stories featured some of the most gruesome and troublesome details I think I’ve ever read about. They featured the experiences from the citizens of Gorazde, and the troubles they or their family went through during the Bosnian War.

I think the affect of Safe Area Gorazde resonated more with me than the affect of Persepolis (however Persepolis is still a great read!!).

I say this in part because of the in-class discussion we had when we read this graphic narrative.

In small groups, we talked about Sacco’s use of the term “Silly Girls” as the title of one of his chapters, and whether or not this was meant to be offensive. I think collectively we decided that it wasn’t – that he was using “silly” to make the characters more relateable, and that he was giving these characters personality.

One example of this discussed in my small group featured Sabina, one of the aforementioned “Silly Girls”. Sabina during the Silly Girls chapter (50-56) mentioned how she’d longed to leave her home in Gorazde, however at the end of the book (150-154) when she had that opportunity, she told Joe’s character about how she missed her friends and family back in Gorazde.

This was something we found particularly relateable in our small group. Being in a University setting you meet people who, before they came here, longed to move out of their family homes. Now, with the sudden onset of responsibilities, they begin to miss home, and especially family, just like Sabina did at the end of Safe Area Gorazde.

Never before did I think I would have something in common with someone who lived through a war, however Joe Sacco’s graphic narrative proved me wrong.

The book highlights that no matter who you are, or where you’re from, you are not better than anyone else, and I think this point is argued throughout the graphic narrative, but especially in the example mentioned above.

It portrays the Bosnian women in the story the same as the American man; capable of being silly, being relateable, and being human.